Dealing with dementia through poetry

Writing Dementia Blog was professor and poet Susan Schultz's way of coping with her mother's decline into a debilitating disease. The poet read from her collection last week as part of the Boise State MFA Reading Series, reports the Arbiter Online, and her poetry about her mother's struggle with dementia struck a chord among listeners:

“Susan Schultz’s poetry defies discrete categorization,” Vesper said. “Her poems are documentary in the sense that they’re invested in story, though the stories she tells don’t typically resemble the ones we are used to hearing.”

Her mother’s rapid decline inspired Schultz to write the series of poems which do not follow chronological order. The reason for this is to create a sense of confusion before showing the tie together as a way to put the reader in her mother’s shoes.

“When someone dies, you grieve and then you keep going, but when someone is just losing and losing and losing their identity, it is a very different process. It’s a kind of ongoing grieving that doesn’t resolve itself,” Shultz said.